Charulata
is the most successful film of a group Satyajit Ray made in the mid-1960s
with the actress Madhabi Mukherjee. Whereas the director's first
films—especially the Apu trilogy—trace the education and
growth to maturity of young male heroes, these mid-1960s films treat, in a
variety of periods and social contexts, the problems of women in Indian
society. As in the early films, Ray's method is to use a mass of
brilliantly observed and often very funny details to build a single strand
of plot.
Charulata
, one of Ray's undoubted masterpieces, is adapted from a story by
Rabindranath Tagore and set in a period of particular significance to the
director: the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Charulata, the
sensitive but bored wife of a westernized newspaper publisher finds
herself drawn sexually to her husband's young cousin who comes to
stay and shares her taste for literature. The film moves with beautiful
precision from flirtation and almost childish competitiveness to near
tragedy amid a lovingly reconstructed period setting. While
Tagore's story ends in disaster, Ray is less conclusive, choosing
to freeze the film's last frame as husband and wife are about to
come together again. This refusal of tragedy points to the characteristic
form of Ray's films. One of the creative tensions in his work is
that between the often rambling narratives he adapts and the tight shaping
impulse of his imagination, which produces story patterns to match the
most finely wrought classical Hollywood movies. But just as villains are
absent from his work, so too is narrative closure and
Charulata
is typical in its rejection of finality where the characters are
concerned.

In considering Ray as a filmmaker it is important to remember that his
work has no roots in the traditions of Indian cinema. His early films are
resolutely independent of the devices and conventions of the Hindi movie,
of which he had little if any direct knowledge at this time. Ray's
is a personal synthesis of an Indian sensibility and the formal lessons of
western cinema. Though he is often seen as the heir to Italian neorealism
and works like Vittorio De Sica's
Bicycle Thieves
have made a profound impression on him, there are fundamental
differences. In particular Ray refuses actuality—the living
presence of contemporary society—which was so crucial to filmmakers
like De Sica and Rossellini. Ray habitually turns to the past, and the
particular significance of
Charulata
, beyond its incredibly sensitive study of personal interaction, is the
period to which Ray turns. Both Ray's ancestors and the Tagore
family belonged to the educated elite of the Bengali middle classes who
formed the "middle-men" between the colonizers and the
colonized. Their knowledge of English gave them key posts in education and
administration under the British, and also made them a channel through
which the new intellectual ideas from Europe (democracy, liberalism,
nationalism, the liberation of women and social equality) flowed into
Indian society.
Charulata
celebrates this moment of interaction: the husband Bhupati devotes his
wealth and energy to his English-language newspaper which will disseminate
the new ideas. A key moment is the party that he throws to celebrate the
Liberal election victory in London. But the nineteenth-century Bengali
Cultural Renaissance was not merely an assimilation of western ideas. Its
participants combined this with a re-examination of traditional arts at
his college— now a university—in Santineketan. Here too, Ray
is faithful to his family traditions, for all his finest films are
explorations of Indian society. Finally
Charulata'
s power comes from the sense of Ray's personal discovery of a key
moment of fusion between India and the West.